The Eve of Destruction

James T. Patterson “The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America”  Basic Books, 2012, 247 pp.

James Patterson is Professor Emeritus at Brown University.  Many historians apply different dates as transformative, events that happened at those times to explain our current circumstances.  Many choose 1968 and all the assassinations of that year, the Tet offensive, and the election of Nixon, but Patterson makes a convincing case for 1965 as the transformative year.  The year 1965 began with a nation still stunned by Kennedy’s recent 1963 assassination but a nation still optimistic and few objecting to President Johnson’s proclamation in January 1965 that the country had “no irreconcilable conflicts.”  The year would end with the transformation of America’s familiar culture of rules into a culture of rights and benefits that remains with us to this day.

In 1965 Johnson succeeded in passing a multitude of Great Society legislation, including Medicare, immigration reform, and an important Voting Rights Act.  However, all was not peaceful.  Turmoil erupted in the South when police attacked civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama.  The U.S. also rushed into escalating the Vietnam War which, in turn, incited protests at home.  On August 11th, five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, racial violence exploded in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The six days of looting and arson that followed shocked many Americans and the nation became deeply divided; enthusiasm for any of the president’s remaining initiatives disappeared and the civil rights movement was placed in a state of disarray.  

My Notes:

Pg. 13:  The conflict in Vietnam did not preoccupy the American public in late 1964.  Some 23,000 American military personnel were stationed there by the end of that year (an increase of 7,000 since Johnson had become president in November 1963).  LBJ referred to them as noncombat “military advisers.”  At the time, it would be hard to believe that Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would soon fight or that more than 58,000 of them would die and more than 303,000 would be wounded between 1965 and 1973.

Pg. 21:  A particularly controversial ad by the Democrats attempted to demonize Goldwater.  It showed a little girl counting up slowly—“one…two…three…”—as she picks petals one at a time from a daisy.  As she nears “ten,” a male voice, echoing as if from a loudspeaker at a nuclear missile site, begins counting down, “ten, nine, eight…one.”  At this point a nuclear explosion blackens the scree, and the image of the girl dissolves into a mushroom-shaped cloud.  A voice, unmistakably Johnson’s, announces, “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.  We must either love each other, or we must die.”  With the screen dark, a message appears in white: “Vote for President Johnson…”  This election campaign of 1964 signaled the coming of an ideologically confrontational political world that would become a feature of the Sixties.

Pg. 23:  On August 4, 1964, President Johnson told the American public that North Vietnamese patrol boats had just attacked US destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of North Vietnam.  Thought the commander of one of the destroyers, reversing an earlier message in which he had reported enemy fire, relayed serious doubts that any North Vietnamese military action had occurred that night, LBJ did not wait to nail down all the facts.  Johnson used the alleged attacks as a pretext to call on Congress to approve a joint resolution that would authorize him to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the US and to prevent further aggression” in the area.  Congress approved the resolution unanimously in the House and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.  Polls soon afterward indicated that 85 percent of Americans supported Johnson’s action.

Pg. 65:  March 7, 1965, “Bloody Sunday,” is one of the most memorable days in the history of the civil rights movement.  In Selma, Alabama, white deputies and state troopers tore into some six hundred nonviolent civil rights marchers crossing a bridge on their way to demonstrate at the state capital of Montgomery.  Wielding clubs, nightsticks, and electric cattle prods, they battered the marchers.  Bloody Sunday led to a resounding political triumph that had been politically elusive up until then: passage that summer of an effective Voting Rights Act.

The next day, March 8, a second event took place that would define the year: thirty-five hundred marines, the first American combat troops to land in Asia since the Korean War, splashed ashore at Danang, on the South Vietnamese coast, 375 miles north of Saigon.  (By 1969, when the US ground combat effort peaked, more than 550,000 American troops were stationed in Vietnam.  Before the US extricated itself from the conflict in 1973, more than a million North Vietnamese troops, 250,000 South Vietnamese troops, and 800,000 Vietnamese civilians had been killed).

These two events, Bloody Sunday and the marines landing, pulled the US into the contentious era that Americans now think of as the Sixties.

Pg. 112:  Connecticut, in June 1965, enacted a bill requiring fluoridation of water supplies in all communities in the state with populations of twenty thousand or more.  This was not a revolutionary move: some forty-eight million Americans in 2,792 communities were already drinking fluoridated water.  But fluoridation, which many conservatives had denounced as an unwarranted and dangerous intervention by Big Government—or as a communist-inspired plot—remained controversial.  In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satiric film Dr. Strangelove, Jack D. Ripper insists that communists were backing fluoridation in order to “sap and impurify” the precious bodily fluids” of Americans. 

Pg. 149:  The Warren court on June 7, 1965, announced its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which overturned an 1879 Connecticut law that had forbidden the use, even by married couples, of contraception.  In the decision, Justice Douglas stressed that married couples must have the right to make their own decisions concerning birth control.  Conceding that the Constitution offered no guidance on the subject, he declared that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras”—shadows—“formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”  Various of these guarantees, he said, created “zones of privacy”.  Griswold v. Connecticut served as a precedent for a number of rights-based later decisions, Roe v. Wade for instance in 1973.

Pg. 188:  Black out-of-wedlock child bearing rose from 23.6 percent of all black births in 1963 to 38 percent by 970 and to 70 percent by the 1990s.  Black unemployment continued to be more than twice that of whites, and the level of poverty, was more than three times as high.  In 1965, 45.4 percent of blacks were still living in poverty (compared to 13.2 percent of whites). 

Pg. 189:  In 2010 the official poverty rate for blacks was 27 percent, roughly three times the 9.9 percent rate for non-Hispanic whites.  The black unemployment rate in 2011 was 16.7 percent, for whites 8 percent.